Each day, Americans receive billions of calls and texts, many of which are unwanted. It’s enough to make a lot of people stop answering the phone altogether, let calls go to voicemail and ignore texts from unknown sources. In response, telemarketers and scammers have been getting smarter, sparking a technological arms race for the customer’s attention.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission proposed several new measures to fight the rising tide of robocalls and spam texting, all of which will be discussed in the FCC’s Open Commission Meeting in December. Among the measures announced by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Nov. 21 was a proposal to create a “reassigned number database” of numbers that have been reassigned to someone else. This would reduce the number of calls we get after we’ve gotten a new number that previously belonged to someone else — particularly useful when the person who last had the number is being pursued by bill collectors or creditors.

Bill Moak(Photo: Sarah Warnock/Clarion Ledger)

Every day, thousands of numbers are recycled from one customer to another (I found one 2015 estimate that 37 million numbers were recycled every year in the U.S.) Although it’s estimated that the list of potential new telephone numbers won’t be exhausted until 2047, it’s common for carriers to recycle old ones. If you get a new device and don’t keep your number, you may have gotten calls meant for the other customer. Some of these are harmless, but others might expose you to fraud or being pursued for something the other person did. It can be a nightmare if your number belonged to someone with bad credit, criminal behavior or even just a shopaholic.

The new measures would require a 45-day waiting period for a number to be reassigned and would help companies to identify numbers in their databases that have been recycled. In some cases, companies — such as banks — have gotten in trouble by calling numbers they thought were legitimate, but had been transferred to a new owner.

The FCC is also going to discuss a draft ruling on two previous appeals from mass-texting companies Twilio (who petitioned the FCC in 2015) and Public Knowledge (2007). The companies had asked the FCC to consider two types of mass texting as “commercial mobile services” (in other words, telecommunications services). That would mean they’d be regulated differently from information services and open the door for carriers to use technology to block robo-texts at their discretion.

“Combatting robocalls is our top consumer protection priority, and these proposals are a significant step forward in that effort,” he said. “Americans rely on and trust text messaging. That’s why we need to act to prevent a deluge of spam texts and scam messages…I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting these proposals and continuing our fight against unwanted robocalls and robotexts.”

Consumer groups, state attorneys general and mobile industry groups have generally opposed the companies’ petitions, arguing that carriers should be able to block robo-texts. Pai, in a news release, outlined his reasoning for the two measures. First, he said, many Americans — especially younger ones — consider texting their primary method of communicating with their friends and families, and that effective communication could be reduced by an onslaught of unsolicited texts. In addition, he noted, first-responder groups have said having more unsolicited texts could potentially interrupt life-saving communications with 911 and other emergency services.

For their part, both companies and others in the industry are standing their ground. Public Knowledge’s senior vice president, Harold Feld, in a statement on the company’s website, called the proposals an overreach that served big business at the expense of free speech, and would allow them to discriminate against speech they don’t agree with. “It wouldn’t be the holiday season without Chairman Pai giving a great big gift basket to corporate special interests at the expense of American consumers,” Feld argued.